i see a dark stone that looks like a solid spinning wheel. it sparkles as if made of grey diamonds, only the diamonds are words - shimmering, a-live words. the wheel vibrates with an internal hum, but it does not move.

a long, thin knife with a dull blade materializes above it, and the wheel starts spinning, faster and faster until the air around begins to move in outwards waves.

the knife moves slowly downwards and begins a seesaw motions on top of the wheel - where they touch (a tangent), words explode into yellow suns that the air waves catch and push further and further away, their songs of triumph and despair growing fainter, their lights becoming minuscule, burning red eyes that look back one more time before disappearing into the distant, black silence.

the wheel keeps spinning, the knife becomes sharper and shinier, they both give of themselves to build and send out a symphony of praise.

i will be haunted by this one line. i have never felt this image before, inside me: the wheel has always been for me associated with clay, with gently giving shape to primeval matter - a gesture immersed into the feminine, as Bachelard would say :-)

roxana, i have a long standing fascination with the spinning wheel and the clay - it looks so elegant and effortless when you see it done right - a different kind of poem.

but the clay, it needs to be moistened and softened and gets pounded and pushed and pulled, and then spins at that terrible speed... and then it goes into the fire. so i guess i never thought or felt it to be a gentle process.

re bachelard and the feminine, that reference sent me straight to the internet to read more - i have to send you one article, it ends like this:

"Therefore, whilst numerous critics remain puzzled as to why 'such a creative mind and prolific writer, so well known in France, has remained in relative obscurity in the English-speaking world', I wish to suggest that Gaston Bachelard is best left vegetating in his unrestricted 'reve de penetration'."

welcome

Manuela

Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative - that we're now just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different - that this is human destiny, this is human nature. A poem can add its grain to all the other grains and that is, I think, a rather important thing to do.- Adrienne Rich

The poem has a social effect of some kind whether or not the poet wills it to have. It has a kenetic force, it sets in motion...elements in the reader that would otherwise remain stagnant. - Denise Levertov

Before, under, and through the wonderful terrible wrestling with words and music there is a state of mind which I’m calling ‘poetic attention’ ... a sort of readiness, a species of longing which is without the desire to possess, and it does not really wish to be talked about. - Don McKay

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I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. … The name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom. - Ursula Le Guin